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Two-Stage Weekly Shift Scheduling for Train Dispatchers

Authors Tomas Lidén , Christiane Schmidt , Rabii Zahir

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Author Details

Tomas Lidén
  • Department of Science and Technology (ITN), Linköping University, Sweden
Christiane Schmidt
  • Department of Science and Technology (ITN), Linköping University, Sweden
Rabii Zahir
  • Department of Science and Technology (ITN), Linköping University, Sweden

Funding

This work is part of the Trafikverket-funded project Capacity Modeling and Shift Optimization for Train Dispatchers (CAPMO-Train) (TRV 2020/99267). Partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2022-06725.

Acknowledgements

The computations were enabled by resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) at Linköping university (the Tetralith server). We would like to thank Magnus C. Johansson, Carl-Johan Wallentin, and Sebastian Olred from Trafikverket, TC Malmö, for their time and expertise in mapping the constraints on train-dispatcher shifts. Finally, we thank the reviewers of this paper for their valuable feedback.

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Tomas Lidén, Christiane Schmidt, and Rabii Zahir. Two-Stage Weekly Shift Scheduling for Train Dispatchers. In 24th Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2024). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 123, pp. 6:1-6:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2024.6

Abstract

We consider the problem of creating weekly shift schedules for train dispatchers, which conform to a variety of operational constraints, in particular, several work and rest time restrictions. We create the schedules in a two-stage process. First, using a previously presented IP model, we create a set of feasible daily shifts, which takes care of minimum-rest and shift-length requirements, taskload bounds, and combinability of dispatching areas. We then formulate an IP model to combine these daily shifts into weekly schedules, enforcing that each daily shift is covered by some dispatcher every day of the week, while ensuring that the weekly schedules comply with various restrictions on working hours from a union agreement. With this approach, we aim to identify "good" sets of daily shifts for the longer schedules. We run experiments for real-world sized input and consider different distributions of the daily shifts w.r.t. shift length and ratio of night shifts. Daily shifts with shift-length variability, relatively few long shifts, and a low ratio of night shifts generally yield better weekly schedules. The runtime for the second stage with the best daily-shift pattern is below three hours, which - together with the runtime for stage 1 of ca. 2 hours per run - can be feasible for real-world use.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing → Transportation
Keywords
  • shift scheduling
  • IP
  • train dispatcher shift scheduling

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